PRESTOPUNDIT'S ONE STOP GUIDE TO THE ECONOMIC CRACKUP

All you need to know to understand the current economic bust in 36 little articles:

• Mark Thornton, "The Housing Bubble in 4 Easy Steps"
• Gerald O'Driscoll, Jr.  "To Prevent Bubbles, Restrain the Fed"
• James Gwartney, "On The Fed and Greenspan"
  
• Michael Lewis, "Inside the Wall Street Doomsday Machine"
  
• John Taylor, "An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong" (pdf)
• OC Register, "How Subprime Lending All Started in OC"
  
• Peter Wallison, "Goverment Policies and the Financial Crisis"
• Jim Grant, "Is the Medicine Worse Than the Illness?"
  
• Arnold Kling, "Why Credit Default Swaps?"
• Mike Shedlock, "Krugman Still Wrong After All These Years"
• The Wall Street Journal, "Lender Lobbying Blitz Abetted Mortgage Mess"
  
• Russ Roberts -- "How the Government Stoked the Mania"
• Anonymous, "A Worm's-Eye View of Wall Street"
  
• The NY Times, "Inside Washington Mutual"
• Mike Shedlock, "Time to Break Up the Credit Rating Cartel"
  
• William Black, "Fiddling While Rome Burns"
• The Washington Post, "The Crash:  What Went Wrong"
  
• Lawrence White, "What Really Happened"
• The NY Times, "White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire"
  
• Martin Baily, et al, "The Origins of the Financial Crisis"
• Steve Sailer, "The Diversity Recession"
• Richard Wagner, "A Remarkable Question"
  
• George Selgin, "Guilty as Charged"
  
• Gerald O'Driscoll, Jr. -- "Subprime Monetary Policy"
• Steve Sailer, "Karl Rove -- Architect of the Minority Mortgage Meltdown"
• Lawrence White, "How Did We Get Into This Financial Mess?"
• Warren Coats, "The D E Fs of the Financial Markets Crisis"
• Arnold Kling, "My Planned Oral Remarks on Freddie & Fannie"
• Mike Shedlock, "Time to Break Up the Credit Rating Cartel"
  
• John Cassidy, "Anatomy of a Meltdown"
• William Black, "Adam Smith Was Right About CEO Incentives"
  
• Sebastian Mallaby, "Blaming Deregulation"
• The WSJ, "The Weekend That Wall Street Died"
  
• Tyler Cowen, "Bailout of Long-Term Capital"
  
• Arnold Kling, "Testimony on the Collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac" (pdf)
• Robert Higgs, "Lucas and the Fed"
• Wikipedia, "The Greenspan Put"
  

The Mises Institute also has a good compendium of articles on the current crisis collected at The Bailout Reader.  And REASON magazine has one here.  See also The Housing Bubble Hall of Shame, Mortgage Fraud Blog, HousingBubbleBust.com, The Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter, The Home Builder Implode-O-Meter, The Hedge Fund Implode-O-Meter, and The Bank Implode-O-Meter. 

And for the best continuing analysis of the meltdown see: Calculated Risk, Mish's Global Analysis, EconLog, Cafe Hayek,Mises Institute, The Mark Levin Show, Division of Labour, Peter Schiff, The Austrian Economists, The Cato Insitute, The Heritage Foundation, and American Enterprise Insitute.

Want to dig a bit deeper?  What to understand the economics  behind the boom and bust cycle? Well, this is your chance.  Here's how.  Read one or two of these books and articles by Friedrich Hayek or these essays by Roger Garrison or this book and these articles by Gerald O'Driscoll or this book by Henry Hazlitt, or any one of these books and articles by a variety of other authors. Read some of this stuff and trust me, you will be smarter than a smarty pants macroeconomist in the Ivy League.  Don't have time for the long stuff?  Here are some shorter things for beginners or those just pressed for time:

• Roger Garrison -- "Business Cycles"
• Roger Garrison -- "Capital Based Macroeconomics"
• F. A. Hayek -- "Can We Still Avoid Inflation?"
• F. A. Hayek -- "The Pretense of Knowledge" -- Hayek's Nobel lecture
  

BONUS MATERIAL

Watch Fred Thompson explain how the Keynesian economics of Bush and Obama will save America:



And see Dan Mitchell explain the wonders of Keynesian economics in this video:



Read about how Hoover-Roosevelt and the Federal Reserve created Great Depression:

• Jim Powell, "Tough Questions for the Founders of the New Deal"
• Burton Folsom, Jr.  New Deal or Raw Deal, chapter 1.
  
• Jim Powell, "How FDR's New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People"
• Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man.
• Murray Rothbard, America's Great Depression (pdf).
• Ivan Pongracic, Jr., "The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman"
• Price Fishback, "Did Keynesian 'Stimulus' End The Great Depression?"
• Lawrence Reed, "Great Myths of the Great Depression"
  

WHO IS BARACK OBAMA? LET ME TELL YOU. I've read about as much about Barack Obama as anyone in the country.  A lot of people claim they don't know who Barack Obama is.  Well, I think I can give you a good idea who Barack Obama is.

[NOTE:  This posting on Barack Obama will always be on top, and always subject to continous extension and revision.  I'll be taking a break from daily blogging here at PrestoPundit, extending into the new year.  Any blogging between now and when I return will done over at the Mises Economics Blog where I will post occasionally on the economic crisis and the economics of Friedrich Hayek.]

Here are a number of things you need to consider. 

1.  Obama's driving ambition as a young man was to be a professional basketball player, and his identity was wrapped up in that dream.  Obama was a failure in this endeavor.   Obama came to blame his failure on structural racism, explaining his failure on his coach's "white" game, which prevented Obama from playing his own "black" game.  He then turned to politics, and put his identity and ambitions into America's vibrant racialist, socialist political subculture.   (All of this is in Obama's memoir.  Try this.  Go read it.)

2.  Obama idealized his father as a politician, and he especially idealized his father's cocky and outspoken socialist idealism.  But in his mid-20s Obama realized that Barack Obama, Sr. was a broken political failure -- a failure in large part due to his own arrogant and outspoken opposition to the capitalist and pro-Western politics of the Kenyan leadership.  Obama came to adopt the political philosophy of Saul Allinsky, who advocated hiding one's true socialists beliefs and working instead to advance a radical socialist agenda incrementally in the language of local cultural identities and economic interests.

3.  A constant refrain in Obama's life is his skill at being a chameleon, putting up a false front and telling made up stories, to ingratiate himself with others.

4.  Obama's relatives on his mother's side come out of a natural resource extraction business, the oil business in Kansas.  And when Obama came of consciousness his step-father also worked in an extraction business.  Oil again.  Early in his life Obama, growing in Third World Indonesia with something of a Third World Indonesian's world view, Obama seems to have equated capitalism and the inequality of capitalism with the wealth disparity created by unequal control of the wealth from oil.  We know that Obama's mother was hostile toward American's in the business of oil, and both his grandmother and grandfather seemed hostile to or alienated from the values of oil patch Kansas.  If oil = capitalism, we get a better sense of Obama's life long commitment to socialism and sharing the wealth.

Let's take a closer look at these items.

1.  Basketball

One of the central mysteries of about Obama is why the man is filled with so much rage and anger -- rage and anger which fills the pages of his memoir, often (falsely) voiced through the words of other characters in the book, who witness to the fact that they themselves never in fact voiced such anger or felt such anger.

To answer this mystery, the first thing to know about Barack Obama is that Obama idealized Julius Irving and his driving ambition as a boy emerging into manhood was to be a basketball star and eventually a professional basketball player.

His high school friends report that Obama was a "basketball-obsessed boy".  But the other thing to know about Obama is that from the point of view of his own self image and ambitions, he was a spectacular failure as a basketball player.

What I'm suggesting, and what I believe, is that to understand Obama you need to understand the effect his failure as a basketball player had on this young man attempting to develop a sense of self during his most sensitive teen age years.

The center stage of Obama's anger, his friends report, was the basketball court, where Obama constantly nursed a sore butt from repeated long sessions warming the bench as a non-starter who rarely played during games.  For example, Obama didn't play in the final championship game until the contest was already decided, and Obama score a mere single basket in that game, a basket with utterly no significance to the outcome of that game.

Obama came to blame his failed career as a basketball player on "structural racism" on the part of his coach, who Obama charged with playing a "white" game (despite the fact that four of his starters where non-white) instead of his own "black" game. 

Quotable:

If Sen Obama did show flashes or anger or hurt, according to team-mates and friends, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the basketball court rather than his angst as a young black man in a multi-racial society.

TO BE CONTINUED -- NOTES:

Politico:

For most of their high school years, [Obama's best friend Greg] Orme and Obama lived and loved basketball, even if their hours of practice never translated into much playing time on game day ..

Dan Hale, the 6-foot-7-inch star center of the 1979 Punahou basketball team, said Obama's depiction of Hawaii as a place where race really mattered hardly resonates with him.

"I was certainly oblivious to a lot of what he references," Hale said in an interview. "If you look at our teams, that year I was the only white guy on the starting five. You had three part-Hawaiians, one Filipino and me."

But Hale said he is still enjoying the novelty of a famous classmate. "It's good for me, pre-Alzheimer's, to try and remember this stuff," he said, struggling to recall something other than Obama's love for basketball and his improbable hook shot.

Others are more skeptical that the boy known as Barry felt the angst described by Barack. Furushima said that many of her classmates have expressed dismay at Obama's rendering of the past.

"We are just such a mixed-up bag of races. It was hard to imagine that he felt that way, because he just seemed happy all the time, smiling all the time," she said. "We have so many tones of brown here. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian or black."

His middle school yearbook captures the multiracial mood that many Hawaiians say has always defined the "Aloha spirit." In front of a chalkboard with "Mixed Races of America" written in a student's hand, Obama waved the peace sign for the camera.

On the lower half of the seventh-grade page is the same group, under a heading of "Useless Races in America." The joke, it seems, is on intolerance.

"In Hawaii, our diversity defines us, it doesn't divide us," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), a close friend of Obama's father in graduate school in the early '60s. "We all come from so many backgrounds, we have to get along."

Obama's teammates for the most part are careful not to judge an old friend, even if his memories of racial attitudes at Punahou differ from their own. "I would never say, ah, that didn't happen," said Hale. "But I was pretty wrapped up in my own world back then."

If Obama did show flashes of anger or hurt, according to friends and teammates, it sprang from his lack of minutes on the basketball court more than his angst as a young black man in a multiracial society ..

Through the haze of the '70s, they recall only the "rat baller" who was always up for a game.

Of course, Obama embraced the image of the athlete, dribbling a ball to school and between classes. It was also how he wanted to be remembered.

On his senior yearbook page, he left behind these words: "We go play hoop."

Punahou School:

Beyond the stereotypes, basketball was one place where questions of race didn't dominate. Obama threw himself into the game. "He was what I would call a 'Basketball Jones,'" says Chris McLachlin '64 who coached the lanky teen during his senior year on the Varsity team. "That's a person who lives, eats, and sleeps with their basketball: they dribble it to school, they dribble it between classes, they shoot baskets on Middle Field during lunch. And Barry had that real love and passion for the game."

Bobby Titcomb '80, a commercial fisherman and airline employee, remembers his family driving to the Ke'eaumoku Foodland after school, and "there would be Obama dribbling his ball, running down the sidewalk on Punahou Street to his apartment, passing the ball between his legs. I mean, he was into it."

Obama played back-up forward as the team's sole left-hander. He was regarded as a fierce competitor. "He had this double pump," says teammate Alan Lum. "He'd clutch the ball, jump and stay up in the air and pump the ball and shoot while you were coming down. So if you were smart, you'd jump two seconds after he did and maybe you'd have a chance."

While not a starter, Obama had presence. "He was a leader on the court," says Lum. "He would call people on it if they were doing something wrong. He would question coaches. A lot of things he did, he did for the right reason; a lot of questions he asked I was thinking in my mind, but he was strong and confident enough to ask them. I respected him for that."

Amid the rigors of competition, the team also found time for fun. They worshipped Dr. "J" Julius Erving, who revolutionized basketball with his dazzling dunks and aerial pyrotechnics; they went to see "Star Wars" at the Cinerama Theatre; they suited up to the driving beat of the Rolling Stones (Obama was in charge of pre-game music). Before Thurston Athletic complex was built on campus, the team held shooting practice at Blaisdell Arena and Darin Maurer remembers hauling the guys around in his brown Volkswagen van. They would stop by Mr. Burger at the corner of University and Dole for plate lunches and burgers while grooving to the sounds of Earth, Wind and Fire, Stevie Wonder, and Fleetwood Mac's "Rumors." "I still think of Barry when I hear Stevie Nicks today," Maurer laughs.

In Obama's senior year, the Varsity Basketball team overpowered Moanalua High School 60 - 28 to win the State championship title. Coach McLachlin describes the 1979 lineup as "one of my best teams ever," but Obama seemed to find his real stride elsewhere.

Telegraph:

A keen basketball player, Sen Obama highlights in his book the feelings of alienation caused by "always playing on the white man's court - by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had the power and you didn't."

But that's not the Barack Obama, nor the Hawaii of the 1970s, recalled by his friends, teachers and team-mates. They remember instead the summer of 1978 when "easy-going Barry" was in constant search of a basketball game, strutting around the island as if he owned it, dribbling a ball from school to the golden sands of Waikiki beach as he belted out Earth, Wind and Fire songs in a distinctive, gravelly voice.

Kelli Furushima, 46, a close friend of Mr Obama, recalls: "We're just such a mixed-up bag of races, it was hard to imagine that he felt that way because he just seemed happy all the time. Smiling all the time." Flicking through an old school yearbook, full of pictures of a grinning Obama, she added: "You see he talks in his book about race and stuff, and we all have the same reaction: we're all so surprised that he had any sort of anguish at all. You can see we had so many tones of brown. If someone is brown, they can be Samoan or Fijian or Tongan. I can't tell if someone is Fijian, or black."

Quotable:

"Barry had no personal reference for his blackness. All three of us were dealing with it in different ways," Peterson recalled. "How do we explore these things? That is one thing we talked about. We talked about time. We talked about our classes. We talked about girls. We talked specifically about whether girls would date us because we were black. We talked about social issues. . . . But our little chats were not agonizing. They were just sort of fun. We were helping each other find out who we were. We talked about what we were going to be. I was going to be a lawyer. Rick was going to be a lawyer. And Barry was going to be a basketball player."

Obama's interest in basketball had come a long way since his absent father showed up and gave him his first ball. Now it was his obsession. He was always dribbling, always playing, either on the outdoor courts at Punahou or down at the playground on King Street across from the Baskin-Robbins where he worked part-time. He was a flashy passer with good moves to the basket but an uneven and unorthodox jump shot, pulling the ball back behind his head so far that it almost disappeared behind him. Basketball dominated his time so much that his mother worried about him. In ninth grade, at least, he was the naive one, believing he could make a life in the game.

In Tony Peterson's senior yearbook, Obama wrote: "Tony, man, I sure am glad I got to know you before you left. All those Ethnic Corner trips to the snack bar and playing ball made the year a lot more enjoyable, even though the snack bar trips cost me a fortune. Anyway, great knowing you and I hope we keep in touch. Good luck in everything you do, and get that law degree. Some day when I am a pro basketballer, and I want to sue my team for more money, I'll call on you."

Obama's coach testifies to Obama's obsession with basketball, and Obama's problem with the fact that he didn't get much playing time.

More from the coach here:

Basketball was another route into black culture for Obama. This was the era of Julius Erving, better know as Doctor J, a dazzling star who played the game with both ferocity and grace, and whose signature was the Tomahawk dunk. In his memoir, Obama remarked that half his white basketball friends 'wanted to be black themselves - or at least Doctor J'.

Unfortunately for Obama, the Punahou coach, Chris McLachlin, was a traditionalist who emphasised the fundamentals of the game, rather than Obama's flamboyant 'street' style. Obama, who protested that this was a 'white' method of play, was kept on the bench by McLachlin much of the time.

'He was on a real stacked team, one of the best teams I have ever had,' McLachlin, currently recovering from a stroke, told me as we sat in his living-room, a stone's throw from Punahou. 'He would have started on any other team in the state. He was that good. Played forward, he was a smasher, driver, post-up, rebounder kind of guy. Also very good at one-on-one moves, very creative. He just loved the game, would play it 24/7 if he could. One of only a handful of kids I've ever coached in 38 years of coaching who would dribble his basketball around with him during school. First to arrive at practice, last one to leave.'

There was a hint of regret in McLachlin's reminiscences. 'The older I got the wiser I got,' he said. 'At the time, I was very much a proponent of more organised, structured systems. If he'd been with me later, he would have found a lot more playing time because later in my career I think I did a better job of finding a niche for those guys who liked to be more creative on the floor.' 

Those close to Obama say that the clash still rankles with him. 

2.  His father's outspoken politics -- and his deep professional failure.

Barack Obama idealized his father, and modeled his early life after the outspoken socialist ideals of his father.  And then, when his father died, and Obama soon thereafter traveled to Kenya, he discovered the truth about his father.  His father's outspoken socialist views -- presented in a direct attack against the views of Kenyatta and Mboya had helped destroy his career.

Obama, Sr. was outspoken, opinionated and massively self assured, all who knew him report.  And what he was most opinionated and self assured about was the socialist and African Nationalist future needed for Kenay.

The Boston Globe:

But Obama's sharp tongue soon got the better of him. In 1965, Obama published an article in the East Africa Journal in which he criticized the government's approach to economic planning. At the same time tribal rivalries that had been muted in the interests of independence, were beginning to assert themselves, pitting Kenyatta's Kikuyu loyalists against the Luo tribe of which Mboya and Obama were part. And Obama, had something pointed to say about that, too - that unqualified men were taking the best jobs.

"His friends tried to warn him," Auma Obama said in her brother's book, "but he didn't care. He always thought he knew what was best, you see."

Obama's star began to fall; he was sidelined to a job in the Ministry of Tourism. Frustrated that his skills were not being used, he began to drink more heavily and had a series of alcohol-related car accidents, one of which resulted in the death of another driver.

"He was a terrible driver," said Ochieng. "He would get very excited and zoom like Mr. Toad."

As the Kenyatta regime became the subject of increasing controversy, Obama found many of his colleagues distancing themselves from him. He, in turn, took his anger out on his wife, according to several of his friends, and his marriage began to deteriorate.

"Kenya changed a great deal between 1963 and 1970," said David William Cohen, former director of the International Institute at the University of Michigan and a professor of African history. "Anyone brought into the government with idealism in those early years either exploited the situation, or was completely frustrated. Obama did just what other frustrated intellectuals did at the time, which was to stay in the bars until their minds go to rot."

Steve Sailer:

it appears that Obama Jr. has actually drawn certain useful lessons from his father's failure. The younger Obama is abstemious, cautious, and, while he talks a lot, he seldom says anything that anybody who disagrees with him can understand.

The Washington Post:

It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who went on to become a congressman from Honolulu, but Obama's entire outsize persona -- the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an "incredibly vital personality. He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated. If you didn't know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you're not smart enough to know what you're talking about and you're talking about it, then you don't deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was." 

STICK A FORK IN JOHN MCCAIN.

No one can be surprised that a messiah figure promising change beat a senator flailing at earmarks. No one cared about John McCain's earmarks, my friend. No one was inspired by his insistence that Barack Obama was an "honorable" man or assured by his dismissal of "some old terrorist," named William Ayres. They were inspired instead when the "warrior princess" began to fight the real battles the tired, old soldier was unwilling to engage. While Sarah Palin called out the "old terrorist," McCain smiled and shrugged. While Palin fought to make drilling for oil the legitimate issue it was, McCain insisted he knew more about ANWR than Alaska's governor and clung to his PC opposition. And, in an attempt to further demonstrate his magnanimous reach across the aisle, he vowed to include the genius Al Gore on any Global Warming initiative his administration might advance. Inspiring. While people were given an opportunity to vote on how they actually felt about men marrying men and women marrying women in three states, McCain was reluctant to mention the issue. Loathe to defend the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman? Unwilling to expose his opponent's radical opposition against giving the people a vote? Remarkably, both Florida and California went for Obama and against homosexual marriage. Did those voters know where Barack stood on this issue? Did they understand his stated intention to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act in order to usher in homosexual marriage state by state? Who would have told them except Obama's opponent, John McCain? But marriage was not worth fighting for. The important issue was earmarks, my friend ... earmarks. While a huge percent of Americans--Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike--continue to oppose amnesty and benefits for illegal aliens, John McCain refused to make it a campaign issue. Do the citizens of the United States know Obama supports driver's licenses for illegals? Medical benefits? Open borders? Do they know that of the so-called 44 million uninsured, millions are illegal immigrants? No, because McCain refused to mention it. He was more concerned about demonstrating his compassion to illegals than defending his country against their overwhelming demands. When an attendee at a Wisconsin McCain/Palin rally stood up to declare, "I'm mad! Fight for us!" McCain delivered his trademark Beavis and Butthead laugh, offended at the challenge, not even comprehending the gravity of the moment. The nation at crisis, he thought the race was about him. "Fight with me!" McCain famously urged at the Republican Convention, but we quickly discovered he perceived the fight to be for his shot at the presidency, not the preservation of the union. If he had really understood the dangers, how could he have remained cavalier and unserious about so many important issues? A loss for McCain meant a return to the rich privileges of the Senate, a beautiful, millionaire wife and plenty more opportunities to fight earmarks and reach across the aisle. While the nation reels from his weakness, we were the ones who lost, not he. As McCain met with the president-elect this week, speculation grows on a cooperative, bipartisan effort to bring citizenship and benefits for illegal immigrants. And since all campaign promises are off and the great compromiser still boasts of supporting leftist Supreme Court Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg we can likely look forward to seeing him champion more bad nominees, more illegal immigration, more foolish global warming initiatives and more attention-getting gimmicks to demonstrate his maverick madness. I voted for him out of self-preservation, but I would not have been proud of my candidate if this misguided lion lacking courage had made it to the White House. Still, I fear he will do more damage outside the White House than inside, and that, my friend, is a bi-partisan reach we could live without.

BUSH IS SOUNDING MORE LIKE HOOVER EVERY DAY.  Hoover did everything he could to interrupt the healthy self-coordination of trade and commerce -- and then posed as the poster boy of the "free market."  All in one swoop Hoover helped to destroy the market -- and the reputation of idea of the free market.  Bush has been doing the same.

Hoover's anti-coordination, anti-market policies are well known.  If you "don't know much about history" or you are still caught up in the bogus myth of Hoover propagated by grossly dishonest Democrat journalists and historians 40 years ago, you might start with this eye opener.

FOX NEWS IS SPREADING VICIOUS LIES about Sarah Palin, being dished out by leading figures in the John McCain campaign, and spread in the interest of protecting the reputation of incompetent Presidential candidate John McCain and his manifestly failed campaign staff.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the absurd claim that Palin doesn't know that Africa is a continent and not a country is the most absurdly bogus lie I've heard yet in the ongoing attempt to smear Palin as a drooling, brain dead, hillbilly idiot.

Will the McCain people please just go away, and stop doing their damndest to damage the Republican party and the conservative movement?

Video here and here.

It looks like it was all out war by the McCain "moderates" against Sarah Palin in the final weeks of the campaign.

Allahpundit:  "they might as well have tossed in a story about her having to guess who's buried in Grant's tomb."

UPDATE:  Malkin weighs in.  And Robert S. McCain's has more on Palin and the gross incompetence of the McCain people.

HERE'S WHAT THE POPULATION WEIGHTED county-by-county vote actually looked like. Yes, that's Orange County bulging out in Southern California.


And here is what a population weighted state-by-state map looks like:


Source.

AMERICAN IS WELL ON THE WAY TO BECOMING A BANANA REPUBLIC.  Read the argument.  Some words of advice:

My point is that sooner or later the U.S. government is going to have to get serious about stripping the assets of those of us who have tried to live within our means. Sooner or later, the profligate are going to take from the prudent, the grasshopper is going to confiscate the property of the ants. If you've got wealth, you need to find a haven for it. You don't want to keep it in a banana republic for too long.

OBAMA IS APPOINTING one of the most vicious and rabidly partisan politicians in the history of the country as his chief of staff.  Welcome to the "post-partisan" reality of the Obama Presidency.

So far those of us who have thought the worst of Obama are two for two with his first major decisions as leader -- selecting the most far left man in the Senate besides himself as his VP, and the most viciously partisan leftist operator in the country as his chief of staff. 

All of those "conservatives" who voted for Obama "hoping for the best" are being proven fools with every Obama decision.  I'm guessing this will continue to be the case.

HOW BAD WAS IT for McCain?  He almost lost Orange County, California, the ground zero of the Reagan Revolution -- and he lost Riverside, San Diego and San Bernardino counties, ground zero of the massive anti-tax, anti-immigration Schwarzenegger earthquake of 2003.

And lets be clear.  If McCain had done the right thing on the Wall Street bailout and the mortgage meltdown, he would have won these counties.  McCain's crackup and sellout during the bailout cost him the election (more here), not just in non-LA Southern California, but around the country.  The one true thing McCain said last night is that he himself is responsible for the loss of the election.  The vote last night, more than anything, was a vote against John McCain.  A majority of Republicans in the primaries never supported this man as their candidate for President, and as I pointed out at the time, McCain beat out his rivals only because of the vote of non-Republicans in a number of key Republican primaries.

Once again we had a weak candidate who was beyond the age any man should run for the Presidency.  John McCain did a selfish disservice to America and to the principles we hold by putting his ambition to "be somebody" ahead of the leadership requirements of the Presidency.  I know that's harsh, but it's what I believe.

UPDATE:  McCain did worse than George Bush among moderates and liberals.

OPDATE II:  Robert S. McCain on John McCain's mortal self-wounding, Oct. 2, 2008:

Last week's idiotic gesture -- "Suspend the campaign! Cancel the debate! Pass the bailout!" -- blew up in his face and destroyed all rational hope that he can win on Nov. 4. So now he's looking around for scapegoats, and any reporter (or columnist) who gets within range will do.

Pathetic. Three weeks ago, McCain led by 3 points in the Real Clear Politics average (and one poll showed him +1 in Michigan). A week later, when the polls started to slip, he freaked out and tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on SEC Chairman Chris Cox. When that didn't work, and with his poll numbers slipping even further, he decided to take ownership of the unpopular $700 billion bailout.

A WORD to the wise.  And yes, after Barack Obama, I do believe John McCain will be enemy number one to liberty and conservatism over the next four years.  Sure I hope I'm wrong.  Only, with these sorts of things, as much as I'd wish things to be otherwise, I keep being dead on right.  It's a cruel fate to actually understand what is going on in the world.

ANYONE WANT to argue with me that George Bush was a disaster as President?  And McCain was a disaster as the GOP candidate?

UPDATE:  No argument from Derb.  And no argument on McCain from Ace.  Read 'em both.

And what really tells the story is that McCain is barely pulling 54% of the vote in Arizona, among the people who know him best.  And McCain lost even his home state among voters under 30.

UPDATE II:  No arguments here, either.  A must read.  And don't miss this either.

I KNOW this is a great moment for every American and especially for every black American (if we look at this election as a symbol, and not as a particular political outcome).  But listening to Obama's speech tonight I've got to say, what a gas bag.  There's no "there" there when he talks about where he is taking America and what we have to do.  It's worse that mere air.  It's a hollowness that actually sucks substance out of the air. 

I have deep and well earned concerns about who he is, and what mistakes he will make, and where he wants to take the country.  But beyond that I'm already bored to tears this "soaring" rhetoric and these empty words.  He's imitating great men speaking great ideas at momentous times in our history.  But there are no great ideas here, there is simply an attractive man with a skin color similar to that of Americans who -- unlike Obama -- were the descendants of slaves and the victims of profound racial discrimination under Jim Crow.

If there was any idea behind Obama's campaign it was the fact of his race.  Beyond that there wasn't much, and tonight, again, what we got was the magic of the fact of a man of his race winning the Presidency. But mostly, for me, there was just the sucking hollowness. 

I guess I'm too post racial, but I'm already beyond that, and all these other gassy words about where we have to go and what we have to sacrifice are starting to annoy.  What matters is what this guy will do, and I'm not at all optimistic that he'll do things to make this a freer, safer, more prosperous, more law abiding country.

In fact, any betting man has got to bet he'll do a million different things to make this a less free, less safe, less prosperous, and less law abiding country. 

I have children, and that's a sad thing to write.

UPDATE:  A locker room pep talk and call to arms from Michelle Malkin.

UPDATE II:  Here's the text.  You find something besides gas in it.

THIS GUY GETS IT.

And it's time to stop whistling past the grave yard -- we're no longer a center right county.  Not even close.  Karl Rove promised realignment with George Bush, and we've got it, good and hard.

And I also think Mark Steyn is right about this:

I think we are near a point at which America joins the rest of the west as a center-left society - that's to say, a society whose assumptions about the role of government and the size of the state are far closer to Continental social democracies than to the Founding Fathers. In a grim media-cultural environment, the temptation for American conservatism is to be seduced into becoming one of those ever so mildly right-of-left-of-right-of-left-of-center parties they have in Europe. We should have the fight about conservatism's future vigorously and openly ..

UPDATE:  A bit of good news.

OBAMA'S GRANDMOTHER HAS DIED.

You couldn't write fiction which would match the story of this election.

Who was Madelyn Dunham?  Read this and this and this for some indication.

KURTZ: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT OBAMA -- THE BOTTOM LINE:

Reflecting on all that I've written about Barack Obama over these past six months, four inter-related points stand out: Obama's radicalism, his stealthy incrementalism, his interest in funding and organization-building, and his willingness to use -- or quietly support -- Alinskyite intimidation tactics.

MORE:

Obama's troubling associations are more than isolated friendships or instances of bad judgment. His ties to Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Rashid Khalidi, Michael Pfleger, James Meeks, ACORN, the New Party, and the Gamaliel Foundation all reflect Obama's sympathy with radical-left ideas and causes -- wealth redistribution prominent among them. At both the Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for example, Obama and Ayers channeled money into ACORN's coffers. ACORN, a militant group pursuing economic redistribution, succeeded in undermining credit standards throughout the banking system, thereby modeling the New Party's plans to tame capitalism itself. So the association with Ayers is not an outlier issue, but part and parcel of a network of radical ties through which Obama's supported "major redistributive change." Via ACORN, that project has already nearly wrecked our economy. What will happen when it's generalized?

And this is what most concerns me: 

In his now infamous 2001 radio remarks, Obama's preferred strategy for promoting "major redistributive change" was through society-wide organizing from below. As president, Obama would connect his massive [government mandated] youth-'volunteer' program to his favorite community-organizer groups, thereby creating a political force for long-term restructuring of the American economy. This was the program of the New Party, and I believe it is still Obama's long-term goal.

"ROCKET SCIENCE" + MORON BOSS = HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS LOST AT AIG.

The kicker?  The moron boss was retained after retirement as a "consultant" at a rate of $1,000,000 per month.

Make sure to read also this and this.

THE BIGGEST CRASH OF THEM ALL .. the truly massive and ongoing crash in the reputation of the macroeconomists.

Quotable:

As recently as six months ago, the consensus was that it was sufficient for monetary policy to engage in inflation targeting or to follow a Taylor rule. Now, Brad DeLong refers to this view contemptuously as "Greenspanism."

If you look closely, you will find that there is no consensus now. Olivier Blanchard's triumphal history of the last thirty years of economics is exactly wrong.

What will emerge? What the public wants is a theory of control. That is, the demand is for a theory that includes ways for policymakers to control booms and busts. To satisfy that demand, my guess is that the economics profession will put most of its effort into rationalizing or tinkering with the consensus. The leaders of the profession have too much invested in New Keynesianism to be able to back away or acknowledge that it has been refuted.

I would not be surprised to see unorthodox theories of control gain traction. Perhaps, to justify current policy trends, a theory that socialized investment is necessary for stability.

To me. the logical thing for the economics profession to do is admit that we are nowhere near understanding what is happening. However, taking that position will not get you invited to panels.

Modern macroeconomics is a pseudo-science run by a band of "idiot savant" math-game playing "jocks", as out to sea as a Medieval guild of astrologers.   The profession is intellectually utterly compromised by deep and overwhelming ties to the massive purse strings and professional prestige offered by the Federal Reserve and other branches of the Federal government.

If it were a union, the government would rightly jail its members on a RICO prosecution, if it were a corporation, the government would rightly smash it.  But as a pretend "science" the profession possesses special immunity -- most especially immunity from competition in a true and open marketplace of ideas.

OBAMA IS BOTH FOR AND AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE.  Glad he cleared that one up.

THERE WAS NO "LEAK" -- good old "gumshoe" reporting by the London Times led to Barack Obama's aunt living illegally in Boston on the public dole.  Quotable:  "Whatever the Democrat campaign may imply, there is nothing suspicious about the story or its timing. The only mystery, perhaps, is how so many people read Mr Obama's book in the US without wondering what might have happened to the mysterious relative, lost in America."

American reporters don't do this kind of reporting anymore, so the naturally assumed the story must have come from a government leak.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration has launched a Federal probe of the non-leak.

"I HAVEN'T BEEN ABLE TO BE [IN TOUCH WITH MY AUNT]" -- Barack Obama's bizarre claim explaining why he hasn't talked to the aunt who became a central character in his 1995 memoir since being elected to the Senate in 2006.

AS A TEEN, BARACK OBAMA WAS LABELED AN "UNCLE TOM" by other blacks, says his best friend in high school -- part of a long profile on "Obama the chameleon" from the Daily Mail.

Of course, this "Uncle Tom" story wasn't in Obama's "memoir", unless you count the made-up sounding story of "Tim", who was supposed to be a "white acting" black student at Occidental taking an economics class.  Obama seems to have done this a lot in his memoir -- assign his own life experiences and deep emotions to other characters in the "memoir".  Rarely has a man written so much about himself, and left his readers so utterly in the dark about who he truly is.

So who is Barack Obama?  Peter Nicholas of the LA Times says he's spent 18 hours a day for the better part of a year, and he still doesn't know who Barack Obama is.

Of course, I believe Obama's "Rosebud" is there waiting for to be discovered by anyone who cares to know.

Peter Nicholas, I'm guessing, in one who doesn't want to know, and doesn't want his readers to know either.

IF MCCAIN hadn't decided he's OK with losing, he would have run ads like this:

SHOCKER! THE AP LIED ABOUT PALIN AND THE ALASKA GAS PIPELINE. 

OK, it's not a shocker.  The AP makes up false information and reports it as news all the time.

Party before journalism.  The new creed of the Associated Press and "journalists" coast to coast.

I'm canceling my subscription to the Orange County Register after the conclusion of this election.  The paper is dependent on Democrat party press releases from the AP and other wire services for its national news, and I've had enough of that.

OBAMA PLEDGES TO BANKRUPT THE COAL INDUSTRY. 

It's all about Obama's pledge to save the world, you understand.  Save the world, destroy the U.S. economy.  Whatever.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"Barack Obama has the kind of cocksure confidence that can only be achieved
 by not achieving anything else."

-- Thomas Sowell.

One more:

"For someone who has actually accomplished nothing to blithely talk about taking
away what has been earned by those who have accomplished something, and give
it to whomever he chooses in the name of "spreading the wealth," is the kind of
casual arrogance that has led to many economic catastrophes in many countries."

BLOCKBUSTER!

Steve Sailer's new book on Barack Obama -- available free for dowload (pdf).

View it now here.  (pdf)

UPDATE:  Stanley Kurtz's long article on the hard left organizations that gave Barack Obama his start in politics is now on line.  Quotable:

Although Gamaliel and ACORN have significantly different tactics and styles, Swarts notes that their political goals and ideologies are broadly similar. Both groups press the state for economic redistribution. The tactics of Gamaliel and ACORN have been shaped in a "post-Alinsky" era of welfare reform and conservative resurgence, posing a severe challenge to those who wish to expand the welfare state. The answer these activists have hit upon, says Swarts, is to work incrementally in urban areas, while deliberately downplaying the far-Left ideology that stands behind their carefully targeted campaigns ..

Swarts supplies a chart listing "common working-class perceptions of liberal social movements" on one side, while displaying on the other side Gamaliel organizers' tricky tactics for getting around them. To avoid seeming like radicals or "hippies left over from the sixties," Gamaliel organizers are careful to wear conventional clothing and conduct themselves with dignity, even formality. Since liberal social movements tend to come off as naïve and idealistic, Gamaliel organizers make a point of presenting their ideas as practical, pragmatic, and down-to-earth. When no one else is listening, Gamaliel organizers may rail at "racism," "sexism," and "oppressive corporate systems," but when speaking to their blue-collar followers, they describe their plans as "common sense solutions for working families." ..

Since community organizers often use confrontation, intimidation, and "civil disobedience" in the service of their political goals, even liberal foundations sometimes find it difficult to fund them without risking public criticism. As the report puts it: "Some funders . . . are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates." The Woods Fund is both highly respected and one of the few foundations to consistently support community organizing, so its money acts as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, providing political cover for other foundations interested in funding the hard Left ..

MARK STEYN:

In his Wednesday-night infomercial, Obama declared that his "fundamental belief" was that "I am my brother's keeper." Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother's keeper, why couldn't he send him a ten-dollar bill and near double the guy's income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother's keeper, and his aunt's keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama's life, friends and votes. The Obamacons -- that's to say, conservatives hot for Barack- - justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by "hoping" that he doesn't mean it, by "hoping" that he'll "change" in office. "I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible," declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, "than his liberal record indicates."

He's "hoping" that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book, and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that.

IS HE A STONE COLD LIAR or is he just deeply ignorant, the willing victim of the brain dead cocoon of the leftist press and the leftist University community?  I've been saying for a long time now I think he's both.  Here's more evidence for stone cold liar.

SPREADING THE WEALTH -- just another dream from Obama's father:

"What is more important is to find means by which we can redistribute our economic
 gains to the benefit of all .. This is the government's obligation." 

-- Barack Obama, Sr., 1965 in the East African Journal.

HATS OFF TO STANLEY KURTZ.

I'd also like to salute Steve Sailer and some good reporters at the Chicago Tribune.

IS OBAMA A SOCIALIST? Richard Ebeling and Donald Boudreaux weighs in.

THE BETRAYAL OF THE PRO-WAR, second rate, second hand dealers in ideas.  The chicken hawk neo-cons backed what has become an unpo